Posted
by
kdawson
on Sunday August 03, 2008 @10:43PM
from the or-ignorance-possibly-willful dept.

mjasay writes "Microsoft's most recent annual report suggests that the company is increasingly coming to grips with open source, yet also seems determined to perpetuate myths about open source that poorly serve it and its shareholders. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has suggested before that 'free software means no free soda' for Microsoft employees; but this is perhaps the first time that Microsoft has managed to enshrine its ignorance in a public document. In the annual report, Microsoft makes two primary false claims about open source: 1) Open source companies don't invest in research and development and instead largely free-ride on Microsoft's patents and copyrights; and 2) Open source projects don't innovate and instead mimic Microsoft's products. Perhaps Microsoft has forgotten its own 'innovative' past copying of markets and technologies created by Apple and others. But at least Microsoft gets one thing right: 'To the extent open source software gains increasing market acceptance, our sales, revenue and operating margins may decline.'"

$7,000,000,000??? What a monumental waste of money! mAYBE THATS how much the losers at MS have to pay their developers to come up with an OS that doesn't crash, and even then they have failed miserably judging by all the work I have had lately.

If they're spending so much on R&D, where are the fucking results?

Vista? Aero? You have to be fucking joking. That's really the best they could come up with for $7,000,000,000? No wonder Shuttleworth and the Linux crowd are making such fantastic progress.

Well yeah, but do you think that MS invested 7 billion to have nothing but cute research results that don't make any money at all? And don't you agree that despite much exciting research their actual products aren't all that hot? I think that justifies the AC's cry, "$7,000,000,000??? What a monumental waste of money!"

This blog at c/net is just an indication that MS is in a more subtle tone, crapping themselves. They have NO effective response to open source. This has been true since their first public strike at Open Source. (Cancer, anyone?)

The reason? The simple existence of open source is a contradiction to their very own fundamental business model.

They rely on software licenses as their main source of income. They will do ANYTHING to protect that. We know this from their history. They're about control...Because to them, control is profit. (Examples: Protocols, document formats, de-facto standards, anti-piracy schemes like Activation and "Genuine Advantage", etc are all different aspects of control.)

But Open Source turns that model upside down. Software licenses become $0. You don't control and "encourage" people to use your products. You let them do things on their own accord. You let your fellow man/woman choose. It puts more pressure on you to improve the technology.

Companies who are based on this model now focus their resources on tools to give to the community. They let the community innovate while they polish up and improve for their commercially supported variants. (The cycle continues endlessly as they improve and give back).

The result? Microsoft will find it harder and harder as Open Source improves. Granted, the closed source model gets you the money quicker, and its more polished for mainstream PC users, but you don't have genuine user loyalty.

The fundamental weakness here is, if you can create an Open Source equivalent (features that are equal or better), closed source companies will be in serious trouble. Why would people pay if they can get it elsewhere for free? (legally).

This is why they're so scared. They know the day will come. (On that day, be sure to note the share prices and the company's general behaviour).

They can resort to petty distractions and occasional seasons of being nice to open source, but they know they cannot stop this stone wheel. It may grind slowly, but its coming. Consistent improvement, that's what its all about.

3 months uptime - that is not significant uptime at all. When you have a machine that has been humming along for a whole year without a reboot, then you can begin to talk about uptime. It helps if it's a machine running a real task as well (public facing web-server, that sort of thing).

As for your mention of MS Project and Visio, you are aware that Microsoft didn't write them, they bought out the companies that did aren't you? So much for innovation there.

The idea that Microsoft does all it's own innovation is bunkum for the uninformed.

You've got to understand who it is that keeps telling everyone how much innovation that they do - yup, Microsoft marketing itself. That way investors and PHBs look and think how great and forward-looking the company is, not realising that the only thing MS does towards innovation is buy innovative companies!

Add to the list: Hotmail, Virtual PC/Server, Windows networking (BSD for TCPIP, IBM for lanman), Visual Sourcesafe, Foxpro, SQL Server (though, to be fair they did rewrite lots of it in later versions), Internet Explorer, Visio.. the list does go on and on.

I'm not sure if Microsoft counts as innovation for NT itself, seeing as they 'bought' Cutler's team wholesale to reproduce VMS in a different package, and Heljberg who reproduced Java in a different package.

Incorrect in my opinion - *any* machine ought to be able to go 3 months without a reboot (patching software and changing hardware excepted). Why do you feel that your desktop PC hardware or your desktop PC OS should be automatically inferior, to the point that you consider it incapable of running for more than 90 days without the OS crashing, and it's significant if this does not happen?

Yes, there is a difference between mission critical and general every day. True, it's not the end of the world if you have to reboot your machine often or that there will be serious consequences like loss of revenue, etc. That being said, it's rather indicative of how much MS software has lowered the standards of quality. When normal everyday people can get their commodity hardware running on community software to run a year without rebooting, it is not a celebration for Linux users. It's normal. Windo

Which subject are we talking about Windows servers or Windows desktops? Windows servers in production can stay up for long periods of time without reboots because that's the crux of production. You need to keep them up. There are serious consequences for businesses if they are not. There is infrastructure to make sure that they are up like redundant power supplies, generators. This is true for Linux and Unix. To that end, their hardware is usually better.

You may be joking, but I think something similar to WINE might be Microsoft's best approach to fixing Windows:Redesign/clean up the OS without too much regard for backwards compatibility, then put a WINE-like compatibility layer on top.

Almost no one realizes that R&D has only a tiny sliver of R of it, and the rest of it is D. And by Development, they mean everything - developer/tester/program manager salaries, computers, costs of running the buildings and datacenters, IT, etc. So it's not like they spend $7B just on Microsoft Research. Last I heard, MSR costs something like $300M a year. And stuff from there does end up in products every now and then.

Well, if you don't see any of it in products, I'm curious what you call R&D? 'Cause unless I'm mistaken, it means exactly that: Research and Development. It's the first step in the chain that then goes through Manufacturing and later Marketing.

So normally even stuff like developing a new product (say, the XBox 360) does count as R&D. When Ford comes up with a new car, even if it's not revolutionary in any way or aspect? That's R&D. When NEC or Samsung come up with a new TFT, only this time with LED backlight? That's R&D. When Seagate announces a new line of HDDs, only this time with higher density (i.e., pretty much a smaller head and more precise mechanics)? That's R&D too.

Technically even writing a program, any program, is R&D. (That's a mistake many PHB's do: thinking that programming is manufacturing and can be treated and measured like assembly line work.) Manufacturing is when you press the CDs and print the manuals and box it, later. So if none of MS's R&D made it into a product, they pretty much wouldn't have a product.

So, yes, MS does invest in R&D. Now if you're trying to say that they never made some major scientific breakthrough, we can agree on that. But then most other companies don't, either. And I don't remember many fundamental breakthroughs from the F/OSS camp either. They too just tweak a little here and there and occasionally put lipstick on a pig... err... skins and transparencies on the same old program. Not condemning it in any way, but let's not pretend that the latest release of KDE or Firefox are comparable to discovering Penicilin or Quantum Mechanics. It's R&D anyway. And it's still R&D when MS does it.

And yes, occasionally R&D does produce a dud like Vista. Well, that's the inherent risk of it. It happens to other companies too.

1. Because it _is_ R&D. Manufacturing is where you already have a detailed blueprint of what cog/transistor/thingamabob goes where, and you just have to take it from bin A and stick it into hole B. And move on to do the same thing verbatim again. And again.

In programming, the equivalent would be, I don't know, copying someone else's program by hand. It makes no sense. If you have to make the same program again, you just make a copy it, you don't go through the assembly line to make an identical one from scratch. Even bits and pieces, whatever you need again, you don't program verbatim again. You move it to some library class and call it from there. Or it's already included in the compiler or standard library.

Programming isn't manufacturing and it makes no sense for it to work like manufacturing does. There is no mechanical taking a cog from here and placing it there, and knowing in advance exactly which cog, where, and how much time it takes. The whole exercise is, every single time, designing the whole mechanism in the first place.

Just because the manufacturing step is missing, or trivial (e.g., just pressing the CDs), it doesn't mean you can move back one step and proclaim the development stage to be manufacturing. It's just about as silly as, if a river has no delta, moving back a step and proclaiming the whole actual river to be a delta.

But that's what some incompetents do. They learned how to manage an assembly line, and then they re-christen a whole different thing an assembly line if they don't have one. Sorta, when your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

2. It's not even the only one. There have been plenty of other cases where only one piece of something was built, and it was basically the prototype at the end of R&D. It may have been an actual manufactured product, but nevertheless the manufacturing step has been missing or never done, and the "product" was the prototype built by R&D.

As an infamous case, and a botched project at that, take the Vasa. The design had been experimented with and tweaked right until it was put to sea. (And it sank.) If it were a software project, it would have been pulled out of the sea and "debugged" until it works. And it still would have been an R&D stage, rather than mechanical repetitive manufacturing.

Or take the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. There was no assembly line, and (unlike the Nagasaki one) not even testing. It was a prototype right out of R&D. The fact that it was actually used, doesn't make the whole process any less R&D.

So basically again, it seems to me like just a case of some people not wrapping their heads around a different beast. They learned in school that if you have a product at the end it's manufacturing, and if that step is missing, they'll re-christen something else as manufacturing. Just so it fits their mental model.

3. Well, that's still no excuse for incompetence. If an industry works differently enough from others, managing it must fit the reality of the industry, not try to warp the industry to fit the pre-existing mind-set.

Basically, imagine if I came from agriculture, and started managing a car production plant. And went, "no, no, no, see you have to plough the land outside the factory and bury some cars as seeds." Wouldn't you think I'm retardedly incompetent and have no business managing a factory like it's a farm? Well, I'm thinking the same about those who manage R&D as if it were an assembly line.

This report has very little to do with open source, it is all about marketing. The M$ board and executive team is basically treating it's shareholders the same way it treats it's customers. It is feeding them a line of non-committal B$ in order to keep their jobs and maintain a threatened share price.

So M$'s annual report is starting to bear no resemblance to what most respectable companies would produce or what an executive team with integrity would present to shareholders. It is a empty glossy pump up produced by a marketing team rather than an management and engineering team. No new directions, no new products, no new ideas, just more of ballmer's self involved blather and bull shit.

Psychologically it is interesting, hmm, we know everything, we make no mistakes, we are the computer industry, when it goes wrong, it is everybody else's fault, they stole it from us, they don't know anything and the customer is stupid when they don't realise this.

Technically it is quite true that M$ help to create the OSS movement, they were such an unreliable and deceitful supplier of software that they really did do more than anybody else to drive customers to OSS.

Technically it is quite true that M$ help to create the OSS movement, they were such an unreliable and deceitful supplier of software that they really did do more than anybody else to drive customers to OSS.

Somewhat of an overstatement or at least an over simplification. You need only look at the programs that started out in/usr/contrib from long before M$ was even Billy G's wet dream. Programs like grep and awk easily come to mind.

That being said, M$ is what made OSS into a viable, enterprise level force in the computer software business. From their buggy programs and operating systems to their use of vaporware to string the market along, M$'s unwillingness to allow any competitor to survive (DR-DOS or OS/2 anyone? How about WordPerfect, Ami Pro, Lotus 1-2-3, etc?) made open source software necessary. Linux and *BSD would still be hobby toys if there was really a competitive commercial software marketplace with real choice.

Microsoft didn't actually create OSS. Open source software existed long before Microsoft. Microsoft is what made OSS necessary as the only way to offer a competitive, alternative product. One that couldn't be squeezed out of existence through contractual agreements that forbade offering the alternative.

Cheers,

Dave

P.S. I've been using Linux since 1998 and I was an OS/2 user prior to that.

I'm willing to bet there are a couple dozen ideas in this book that invalidate Microsoft patents.

Just about every software patent has an idea that invalidates it. The thing though is, with MS stocking up on patents, we never know which ones they really don't care about and which ones they will sue for. It is expensive and time consuming to strike down every patent, and when someone sues Linux or another F/OSS project in a major suit (like SCO) even though anyone with half a brain knows that it should have been thrown out ages ago, it still leaves CEOs (usually missing half a brain) not using Linux because they are scared they will be sued or the support will end.

Until politicians start to realize that things that apply with the physical world make no sense in the digital world, MS has a legal advantage, and with some judges having the mental capacity of a 4 year old MS might win a few minor suits.

Software patents are the problem. That and insane copyright laws. For example, if I was sued for downloading music, I should be sued at max for $5 per song, because you can usually find that song for $.99 somewhere online. The end of copyright wouldn't serve us any good, because even open source programs wouldn't have existed if not for some proprietary software, Linux was made to be like Unix which was proprietary, Firefox was born from Netscape which for many years wasn't free, etc.

There's no question that they've made some missteps in this area, but I think the tales of their demise are very, very overstated. Microsoft still has an enormous install base, and I would absolutely expect them to try and apply the "embrace and extend" approach increasingly to open source. All they have to do is get more involved in coding for OSS projects, and they can change the entire nature of the situation.

Want current? Submitting OOXML as a vendor-product-tied attempt at sidelining ODF, making a ton of Microsoft partners send form letters to national standard bodies to make ISO fast-track a document the size of the SQL standard.

Oh, and then their implementation is not compatible with the standard to boot so that other implementors of the standard will be incompatible with MS Office 2007...

Hmm, where did that IP stack come from? Where did they get the idea of tabbed browsing? Where did they get a web browser from? The list goes on and on. I wonder how many "patents" came from ideas inspired by open source?

The reason Microsoft is failing is that the parasite has become larger than the host.

The web browser and web server were concepts and implementations that originated within the open-source community.

If MS is accusing the open-source community of absconding with its intellectual property, then why no compunction about incorporating same into their products?

Software *ideas* are just that, ideas. They should not be patented, or patentable, but that's just what's happened and has been encouraged by USPTO. Companies like MS (and many others) rode that bandwagon and have patents that one might call dubious.

Yes, well they're not just wrong to say that FOSS never innovates, they've actually acquired patents bearing on innovations (probably) originally made by FOSS (such as the Enlightenment pager, fundamental aspects of RSS, ICCCM-like extended clipboard formats etc.) As far as I know they haven't yet used any of these patents to steal (no inverted commas) a FOSS developer's own invention and work, but it is not impossible or inconceivable that they might. Their claim that FOSS 'steals' or free rides on their copyrighted [wtf?] and patented "intellectual property" is simply despicable.

Neither the web browser or tabbed browsing originate from open source projects.

False. Somewhere around here I've still got a spool with a copy of the NCSA server and Mosaic sources [wikipedia.org] from way back when. And lookee here, you can still download Mosaic source for X Windows [uiuc.edu], version 1.2 in the directory called 'old'.

That's what the internet was founded on, open principles, not proprietary, though proprietary wasn't ever excluded. Much of the internet's infrastructure was proprietary early on, and still is. But if you're going to assert that open source software is nicking code and patents from proprietary, let's see some evidence, eh?

Don't know about tabbed browsing, though it's plain for anyone to see that MS was late to that party, and brought with it a very clunky implementation.

Mosaic came along a couple of years after the first CERN Web browser and originally was for Unix systems. Mosaic was created at the University of Illinois with funding from Al Gore's legislation [wikipedia.org].

By the time Mosaic became available for Windows, there were several alternatives on multiple operating systems, such as the original CERN browser, Lynx (text-mode from the University of Kansas), Cello (on Windows, from the Cornell Law School) and Viola (on Windows, from a UC-Berkeley student).

All of these were developed in academic research settings, not by commercial enterprises. Sometimes the source code was distributed, sometimes it wasn't. Sometimes there were licenses permitting derivative works, sometimes there weren't.

In early 1994 I contacted NCSA about licensing the Mosaic Windows source code for a newspaper online project I was working on. The price I was quoted was $50,000 for the source code and rights to create derivative works.

NCSA transferred the Mosaic technology and rights to a local firm, Spyglass, which marketed "Spyglass Mosaic" with little success.

Several years after the arrival of Mosaic (and Cello and Viola), Microsoft finally figured out that its proprietary Blackbird online technology wasn't going to survive the growth of the open Web. It then licensed Mosaic from Spyglass and used it as the basis for Internet Explorer.

Would it be possible for Slashdot to have two sections? One for discussion of topics, that present conclusions based upon stated facts and assumptions. And a second section for free expression of angst, like 'Bill Gates is the Borg-Devil' or 'I want to have Steve Jobs iBaby!'.

1) Open source companies don't invest in research and development and instead largely free-ride on Microsoft's patents and copyrights; and 2) Open source projects don't innovate and instead mimic Microsoft's products.

Those sound like the same point. Was it that way in the report or just in the summary... meh, not worth it to RTFA.

Microsoft's innovations stand on their own.Their accomplishments with active directory, for instance, are wonderful. I'd like to see the open source community come up with anything like it.Also, their networking stack is rock solid. It would take years for the open source community to come up with anything as polished.

From the beginning, Microsoft has been an innovative company. MS Dos, Basic, I could go on and on. Their contributions to original research have truly advanced the human condition.

Open source projects are simply parasites on the innovations of microsoft. Bah!

Microsoft's innovations stand on their own.Their accomplishments with active directory, for instance, are wonderful. I'd like to see the open source community come up with anything like it.

Despite the "Funny" mod, there is actually one very good point in there.

Yes I know Active Directory is nothing more than a kerberized LDAP server with a fancy schema. But I also do not know of any F/OSS mechanism to automatically get all sorts of software packages, configuration and policy settings from an LDAP server. Given the number of Linux distributions that exist and the sometimes only slight resemblance between any two in terms of configuration, I suspect that such a product isn't really practical

A 10K report is *supposed* to have a section where the CEO lays out, in gory detail, external threats and situations on the horizon that have a significant chance of derailing their revenue plan for the next year.

What Ballmer is saying here is that

competitors don't have to attack Microsoft broadside, as they have the luxury of going after a niche market

they have the fast follower's advantage of being able to use Microsoft's products, rather than having to do the early R&D themselves (the same advantage that Microsoft once had against Apple, Lotus, and Netscape)

some of the most dangerous competitors are in open source, because they can't be finished off the same way that Microsoft crushed its competition in the '80s and '90s.

IIRC it was Marc Andressen who first hit on this tactic for competing against Microsoft, when Netscape launched the Mozilla Foundation in 1998. It took a few years of fumbling around before that took fruit - probably because the Navigator/Communicator code was so badly written - but that turned out to be a masterstroke of business tactics.

IIRC it was Marc Andressen who first hit on this tactic for competing against Microsoft, when Netscape launched the Mozilla Foundation in 1998. It took a few years of fumbling around before that took fruit - probably because the Navigator/Communicator code was so badly written - but that turned out to be a masterstroke of business tactics.

Microsoft knows that a lot of open source products overlap their patents, many of which would be dubious in court. MS is positioning itself to justify using it's patents to try and crush competing open source projects.

MS will justify crushing OSS in any way possible. Honestly, if you call the people of the FSF free software zealots, then call MS proprietary software zealots. MS basically exists totally proprietary, not to make money, not to be inventive but to prove a key point in the Open Letter To Hobbyists by Gates, that quality software will not be written without a lot of money. Unfortunately for MS, it seems that the tables have turned, just about every quality application is OSS in some part if not fully OSS (OS X, Firefox, Apache, etc) and about the only major software vendor that isn't transitioning to OSS is MS, look at it, Apple mostly has with OS X, IBM has embraced Linux, Sun seems to be trying to open source everything they have, Novell has openSUSE, and everyone in between is getting things open sourced.

Not really worded as the author states, and is quite interesting - mainly the meat is the Risk Factors section where they must report the possible situations on investment/profit risk. Nothing really much there about stealing ideas, but what was omitted by the author was the probable losses incurred by MS "opening up" on some interoperability technology as well as being forced to open up other standards due to high court rulings.

They still call their Licensing "Ownership" as in Cost of Ownership... sigh.

I fail to see where Microsoft makes any "mistakes" in its filing. The statement the company made were, as far as I can tell, correct. Without making judgment calls on R&D models, it's fair to say that the proprietary-versus-open source methods are very different, and that open source products benefit from the fact that their research costs *are* distributed amongst the various contributing developers.

The filing never says that OSS companies don't spend a great deal on R&D, nor does it say that Microsoft's R&D (ie. feature development and coding) hasn't been influenced by outside factors. Therefore, I fail to see how there are any mistruths spoken here.

Keep in mind that this is SEC filing, for goodness sake, and that the questionable sections are intended to be simple, concise analyses of the competition and a few differentiating factors between them and Microsoft. I think it does that just fine.

With all the complaining we do here about the FUD inflicted on us by megacorporations, I am rather embarrassed to see us using the very same tacticts with this sort of story.

Thankfully, most observers are able to see through this particular line of nonsense at this point. Sadly, however, it's likely that Ballmer and other 'softies actually believe it. They're so narcissistic that they really do believe that Microsoft is the epicenter of innovation, and that it really is impossible for good ideas to come from anywhere other than Redmond.

In fact, many open source projects and products use Microsoft as a reference point for how not to design software. Call it a second mover advantage if you like.

Three years ago, I became an unwilling MSFT employee via acquisition (don't worry, I didn't stay and remain ideologically pure ), and that's *exactly* how many Microsoft employees think. It's not surprising and it's not their fault, considering how much effort and money Microsoft spends on propaganda to tell them so. The only place I've ever lived that had a propaganda drive like MSFT HQ was a communist country with huge party banners on many street corners.

Compatibility gets confused with copying. And when you know nothing about the history of computing, well, "UNIX? That's like DOS, right?" Because the GUIs can be made similar to Windows, because menus like OpenOffice are made similar to Office for ease of transition, because compatible file formats are often read and written, people who know nothing about the underlying structure of computers or the history of innovations can logically, if incorrectly, conclude from their experience with Windows from the earlier '90s that linux _must_ be a copy of Windows in the '00s.

1) Open source companies don't invest in research and development and instead largely free-ride on Microsoft's patents and copyrights;2) Open source projects don't innovate and instead mimic Microsoft's products.

I think Microsoft is absolutely right here. I mean if you see this story [slashdot.org] about what they did to BlueJ I think you'd get a better picture of what I mean.

For the most part, MS has bought what is mostly mature technology and made it accessible to the mass market. This is useful, but not innovation. Most of it's problems come from the fact that it is not a super high tech company. It is a medium tech company that provides good components for inexpensive solutions to common problems. This is the second problem. MS does not provide solutions. It is up to third parties to hack together solution to common problems from proprietary MS components and commodity third party components. This can be an efficient method to problem solve, but can be expensive as the MS proprietary solutions are becoming less competitive, and the cost savings are increasingly coming from third party commodity products, products that can run non-proprietary software. A MS certified team to make everything work is not cheap either.

So what MS is and has been saying is that it acquired the IP fair in square, and is properly selling it on the market, while others are just copying. Let us not dwell on the fact that is where MS was 20 years ago when Apple acquired the WIMP interface fair and square and MS copied it to run on cheaper hardware, which let us remember that Compaq created at no small expense fair and square. No, let's just look at the claims as they stand using a classic example, SQL

SQL server was aquired acquired from sybase. Is there technology here that MS can claim was part of that deal, and stolen by the OSS community. I think not. SQL was developed by IBM and what is now Oracle, and was standardized, I believe, in the mid 80's. The two big OSS competitors, mSQL and PostreSQL were both independently developed by teams concurrently with the Sybase product and opensourced, partly or otherwise, by their creator. I am sure that both not include features that MS SQL has, but I would also guess that Oracle or IBM has the features first.

In the end MS problem is simply that they are not 2-3 years ahead of the curve. When this happened to SGI, they went bankrupt. A firm simply cannot charge a premium for this years technology. In the case of software, this is because the OSS people can do the same thing, for free. MS Office is simply too mature to be a profit center. MS Server is simply relatively too low tech. Even the X Box is not at the front of the pack, at least not by more than six months.MS has some traction through collaboration, and they can continue to make money there, but complaining about the loss os MS Windows market share is silly. They had the chance the database file system, but for some reason they did not provide enough resources. This in itself proves that they are not innovative.

MS will lose customers because they are lazy. They will continue to have enterprise customers, they will continue to have the gaming market. We will see the general desktop and server market move away from them unless they come up with something big or go back to their roots as the cheap solution. We see this in the emerging $100-$200 portable market. If this will provide the growth the stock market wants is yet to be seen.

In a surprising twist, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has admitted yesterday that Free Software is the cause of better than average health for Microsoft employees. "Free software means no free soda" is the new catch cry at the Redmond, WA software powerhouse.

"We used to offer our developers free soda, and never thought about the health consequences", said Ballmer while rocking on a designer chair. "Then one day, one of our employees installed Linux on his workstation, which also happened to run the in-house Visual Basic control panel that overrides all the networked soft drink machines on the campus. Suddently, people couldn't get their Mountain Dew anymore, unless they actually paid for it themselves".

Ballmer went on to explain that the programmer who wrote the soda control software had left years ago, and nobody could replace him. Soft drinks were left in the machines for months and morale went down at first among the employees, but soon picked up again when a drop in the monthly rate of deaths from heart failure was noticed. "Free software is like a virus that actually helps you", Ballmer said. "With the money we saved in ambulance fees, I bought every employee a free yo-yo, and even had enough money left over for a new chair. Way to go, Free Software, we love ya!"
Former CEO Bill Gates declined to comment.

Ha! The article directly below this one states that someone has developed an app to graph or diagram SQL statements... Now, that's innovation - and it didn't require any Microsoft products to be harmed during testing or development!

Oh by the way, the Internet itself is an open source effort and I can't imagine anything more innovative or groundbreaking than the most advanced communications medium ever created!

I know it's somewhat taboo to RTFA around here, but I thought I'd compare with the summary anyway:

Article, quoting MSFT:"Some of these firms may build upon Microsoft ideas that we provide to them free or at low royalties in connection with our interoperability initiatives."Implication: there exist some companies that reuse some of Microsoft's ideas, reducing their costs in the process (presumably at MSFT's expense)

Article,quoting MSFT:"Open source software vendors are devoting considerable efforts to developing software that mimics the features and functionality of our products, in some cases on the basis of technical specifications for Microsoft technologies that we make available."Implication: there are open source products that look and behave very similarly to some of Microsoft's products

I understand that bashing MSFT is a popular passtime around here, but when the article summaries are completely misleading, that starts to get in the way of the trustworthiness Slashdot as a whole. If Slashdot hopes to remain relevant in the longterm, it needs to make at least some effort to accurately portray the stories. Otherwise, it will eventually become the internet equivalent of tabloids, worth only the entertainment value of reading the stories+comments, and completely untrustworthy for actual facts.

1) Open source companies don't invest in research and development and instead largely free-ride on Microsoft's patents and copyrights;

I say Microsoft cannot sue. If they could, they would've already done it. I think if Microsoft sues, they are either afraid that they'll get sued for the free-ride they've been enjoying or they simply do not know who or how to sue. OSS isn't really making any money. OSS is not a company. Yes, MS could sue, say, Redhat, but Redhat is not equal to or represent in anyway OSS itself, and I doubt Redhat really does that much IP damage since most of their business is distributing what others have made and providing support - they are not burning CDs of Windows, if you will. Then sue GNOME or KDE? Can't. Sue kernel developers? How? For what? They would have to go project to project performing drive-by lawsuits which will all be tedious and expensive and very unrewarding.

Like all annual reports, these are self-published documents designed to serve the appetites of shareholders. So anything written in it should be viewed with that in mind. It is not a tech document or a fact sheet. It is a spin sheet.

"Our business model has been based upon customers paying a fee to license software that we develop and distribute.. Certain "open source" software business models challenge our license-based software model..."

I do believe MS has been drinking too much of its own koolaid. If they really believe this then they are only deluding themselves. That their current business model is under attack is a given, but not from the Open Source sector. I mean how many times can you sell the same GUI, web browser and email client to the same people. The only real innovation they do is making each new version of Windows more bloated than the previous version, forcing the endusers to buy a new computer year after year. They also manage to make their older formats incompatible with the 'newer' software. That you see the writing on the wall is evident in your "software as a service" sector.

The WinTEL PC is obsolete and people would have moved onto smaller embedded Internet aware devices if it wasn't for your repeated actions in stifling the market. Twenty years of CrapWare. That a bunch of hobbyists working in their garage can produce applications that equal anything Microsoft has produced tells us just how lacking in the innovation department you really are. Anything you ever produced you only ever leeched of the academic sector.

Just for the record though, RMS has stated many times that the decision to base GNU on Unix was a technical one, not a preferred one. He would have PREFERRED to create a whole new OS with a radically innovative design. The reason he chose to be Unix-like was very simple - he knew it would take a long time to finish, and nobody knew what kind of computers would be common when it was ready to use. Unix was (and to a large extent still is) the only portable OS in existence. So the decision to base his code on it was to ensure that GNU would be portable and still work in the future regardless of changes in computing architecture.

Linus did not originally have this goal - Linux was hard-targetted for the i386 platform, and was stuck there for some time -however it's own unixy roots combined with the GNU base it sat upon meant that making it portable was soon not just a high-priority but a working reality.

The fact that today you can run GNU/Linux on practically any computer in existence is a direct result of it's unix-like design.Now take a look at KDE4.1 though, and compare it to VISTA - then tell me OSS isn't being innovative on every level. Right now KDE4.1 is a better desktop for Vista than Vista's OWN desktop !

Just for the record though, RMS has stated many times that the decision to base GNU on Unix was a technical one, not a preferred one.

One might add to this that before GNU, RMS was working on the Lisp machine and its window system.

The GUI toolkit he had developed was more powerful than Swing, Qt, or Gnome, and easier to program. The object system he was working on put AOP and Groovy to shame.

The fact that this software became proprietary despite his objections was what prompted him to develop GNU. And he based it on UNIX and C because he correctly realized that the world wasn't ready for advanced GUIs or advanced OOP. It's taken 20 years for people simply to accept basic single inheritance systems and garbage collection.

The people behind GNU were technical pioneers; they consciously kept things simple with GNU because they knew they were building software for the unwashed masses of programmers.

This is a very good point, but not one that will win favor from the MS-bashing crowd.

The truth of the matter is that much of the "Computer R&D" is incestuous and cannibalistic. Microsoft used BSD networking stack for Windows, and the whole "windowing" motif from Apple. Apple, in turn, got the windowing motif from Xerox. It would be difficult at best to say where the boys at MIT "stole" the idea for the X windowing system.

Some "borrowing" is necessary and understandable. Open Office and Microsoft Office are inextricably intertwined, but this is not necessarily because anyone "stole" from anyone else. This is because any suite of programs that perform the same fundamental functions is going to have some overlap on its functionality.

Microsoft's FUD to the side, yes, new things do come from the OSS community. Microsoft still hasn't implemented Windows over network connections like X does--instead, they use Remote Desktop, "stolen" from the VNC protocol. At the same time, Microsoft has a massive install base, and has become the de facto "standard," as much as we might wish it had not: Linux is still playing catch-up.
I guess I don't see the need to respond to Microsoft's FUD with FUD of our own. After all, if it's wrong for them to do it, is it not also wrong for us?

I guess I don't see the need to respond to Microsoft's FUD with FUD of our own. After all, if it's wrong for them to do it, is it not also wrong for us?

It would be. But the term "FUD" implies deceit. FUD against Microsoft is much more likely to simply be true. They _are_ a monopoly. They _do_ use unfair practices to "compete". They _will_ stoop to almost any low to avoid a level playing field. This isn't FUD in the normal sense of the word. It's fact.

I always thought bundling the browser wasn't even an issue. It was all really Netscape crying like a little baby because they couldn't compete. Back in those days, IE was truly superior, especially when Netscape 4 came out. I remember installing it for the first time and watching it literally take 5 minutes "updating the registry". The thing was a huge bloated mess. Of course, MS hadn't done anything in the way of usability on the thing until Firefox reminded them what innovation was all about. Today IE is losing market share because the alternative is truly superior.

On the other hand, my wife got e-mailed a couple of attachments the other day. On was a.DOC file, and the other was.DOCX. What the hell is.DOCX? Why, it's a new XML format that only Office 2007 can open, of course. Microsoft is still up to their old ham-fisted tactics. I had to find some on-line conversion service to turn.DOCX into something readable because I don't have Office 2007 and you couldn't pay me to use Word (my wife has a student edition of Office 2003). It turns out it was just a simple letter. Thanks, Microsoft. Thanks for yet another in a long series of kicks to the groin, and more of my time wasted simply to serve the ego of that simian running your company.

Aside from the mouse, and icons, Apple really got very little from Xerox. The Xerox UI didn't have user positioned or sized windows. It didn't have the concepts of double clicking, or dragging. It didn't have the contextual menu bar that Apple added to the top of the screen, and instead relied on static buttons on the keyboard for pre-defined options. It used different desktop metaphors....

Xerox planted the seeds for the Desktop idea, but Apple and to an extent Microsoft, really fleshed out the idea and mad

An entire complete operating system including thousands of programs that can be freely shared far and wide at no cost by everyone, suitable for use in the tiniest embedded processors all the way to the top ranked supercomputers on Earth..and now beyond into space?

An entire complete operating system including thousands of programs that can be freely shared far and wide at no cost by everyone, suitable for use in the tiniest embedded processors all the way to the top ranked supercomputers on Earth..and now beyond into space?

Wha? no, you're leaving out all the cool non-development-oriented Free Software created in UNIX such as X and TeX/LaTeX, which were already mature software before Linux was even born. And given that they still are, decades after their creation, still the "industry standard" in their respective markets, they certainly qualify as "major".

But, either way, MS wins. MS can tolerate piracy enough that if everyone in the world just bought one MS product, and pirated the rest, they would still be rich. When you have a business that basically is 0% cost, and 100% profit (no, it doesn't cost even $1 to burn a CD). Lets see how MS makes money, they get lucky, and can write a simple emulator to write a BASIC interpreter for an early computer and manage to sell it to the company, then they lie to IBM, get lucky again, buy some badly-coded OS, change a

Remember how hard it was getting people to switch from a CLI to a new GUI back when the first Macs were coming out? Getting people to migrate to Windows from DOS? It was hard. Now change the interface of someone's most used program, it is the same thing over again. Plus, OOo looks nothing like Office 2007, and that is part of the reason it is being adopted.

Sharp Develop is a bad replica of Visual Studio.

Again, people use familiar things.

Firefox 3 search bar and navigation button interface is derived from that of IE.

There are only a certain number of ways to improve something. For once IE got something somewhat right, so the Firefox developers took that and changed it. Guess what? The tabs in IE 7 are similar to Firefox's, which are similar to Opera's. And as for the UI, it mostly has stayed the same from Netscape onwards, and just about every browser has adopted it.

Linux desktop are inharently trying to copy Windows day by day.

Ummm... Yah. Wrong. First, take a default install of Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distros, you get, 2 taskbars, not like Windows, you get a package management tool, not like Windows, you get pre-installed programs for advanced image editing, word processing, etc. not like Windows. Ok, sure, you have a button on your window manager to close, minimize or maximize your window, but that is about where the similarities end.